Meantime the sergeant was re-loading his rifle.
His foot slipped in the blood of the man who had been
shot in the throat, and the military boot made a greasy
red streak on the floor.
“Why, we can hold this place!” shouted
the sergeant jubilantly. “Who says we can’t?”
Corporal Flagler suddenly spun away from his window
and fell in a heap.
“Sergeant,” murmured a man as he dropped
to a seat on the floor out of danger, “I can’t
stand this. I swear I can’t. I think
we should run away.”
Morton, with the kindly eyes of a good shepherd, looked
at the man. “You are afraid, Johnston,
you are afraid,” he said softly. The man
struggled to his feet, cast upon the sergeant a gaze
full of admiration, reproach, and despair, and returned
to his post. A moment later he pitched forward,
and thereafter his body hung out of the window, his
arms straight and the fists clenched. Incidentally
this corpse was pierced afterwards by chance three
times by bullets of the enemy.
The sergeant laid his rifle against the stonework
of the window-frame and shot with care until his magazine
was empty. Behind him a man, simply grazed on
the elbow, was wildly sobbing like a girl. “Damn
it, shut up!” said Morton, without turning his
head. Before him was a vista of a garden, fields,
clumps of trees, woods, populated at the time with
little fleeting figures.
He grew furious. “Why didn’t he send
me orders?” he cried aloud. The emphasis
on the word “he” was impressive. A
mile back on the road a galloper of the Hussars lay
dead beside his dead horse.
The man who had been grazed on the elbow still set
up his bleat. Morton’s fury veered to this
soldier. “Can’t you shut up?
Can’t you shut up? Can’t you shut
up? Fight! That’s the thing to do.
Fight!”
A bullet struck Morton, and he fell upon the man who
had been shot in the throat. There was a sickening
moment. Then the sergeant rolled off to a position
upon the bloody floor. He turned himself with
a last effort until he could look at the wounded who
were able to look at him.
“Kim up, the Kickers,” he said thickly.
His arms weakened and he dropped on his face.
After an interval a young subaltern of the enemy’s
infantry, followed by his eager men, burst into this
reeking interior. But just over the threshold
he halted before the scene of blood and death.
He turned with a shrug to his sergeant. “God,
I should have estimated them at least one hundred
strong.”
“What will we do now?” said the adjutant,
troubled and excited.
“Bury him,” said Timothy Lean.
The two officers looked down close to their toes where
lay the body of their comrade. The face was chalk-blue;
gleaming eyes stared at the sky. Over the two
upright figures was a windy sound of bullets, and on
the top of the hill Lean’s prostrate company
of Spitzbergen infantry was firing measured volleys.
